Williams Professor Looks at Black Community in Jim Crow Durham
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Leslie Brown, assistant professor of history at Williams College, is the author of "Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South," published by the University of North Carolina Press.The book focuses on Durham, N.C., exploring black community politics during the Jim Crow era. Using interviews, narratives, and family stories, Brown illuminates Durham's black history from emancipation to the civil rights era, and the struggle to give meaning to black freedom and to generate progress.
"With persistent migration, with the numbers of women growing faster than the numbers of men, with working-class African-Americans far outnumbering the elite and middle class, who — to use the phrase of the day — spoke for the Negro?" asks Brown. "The answer is, everyone."
Brown resists the extremes of accomplishment and oppression, experienced within Durham. Instead, she opts to "look at the space between the two, to see black Durham as a bas-relief, a more complex account than a tale of two cities — one safely affluent and the other severely impoverished."
In her book, she argues that their multifaceted identity neither unified nor divided African-Americans despite Jim Crow. Instead, both alliances and alienation were experienced within the interrelated structures of gender and class. The resulting relationships were both interconnected and disjointed, as men and women among the migrants, working, middle, and elite classes sought to carve their own niche in a new free society.
Of particular interest to Brown is working-class black women. "Theirs was the usual experience of African-Americans in the urban south, but this experience was overshadowed by the towering presence of a culture of black business, shunted aside by a public display of black respectability," she writes.
Indeed, these women acted as arbiters on behalf of the community, taking up issues of wages and work conditions. While women of the professional classes focused on respectability, education, and career opportunities, working-class women rallied their efforts behind alleviating the immediate causes and effects of poverty. Throughout their struggles, working-class women challenged both the black elite and middle class within the community, as well as Jim Crow. Their resources helped build Durham's reputation as the "Capital of the Black Middle Class."
Brown's work has been included in several anthologies, including "The Practice of U.S. Women's History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues," "Telling Stories: Black Women in the Academy," "Her Past Around Us: Interpreting Sites for Women's History," and "Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas."
Brown is currently working on a book on black women's migration, an edited collection of interviews, a documents collection, and a volume of the writings and speeches of the late New York Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress.
At Williams, Brown teaches courses that include "African-American Electoral Politics in Historical Perspective," "From Civil Rights to Black Power" and "African-American History from Reconstruction to the Present."
She has also taught at Skidmore College, Washington University, and Duke University. While at Duke, she co-coordinated the project "Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South," a collaborative research and curriculum program at the Center for Documentary Studies.
She is the co-chairman of the Organization of American Historians' 2009 Convention.
Brown received her bachelor's degree from Tufts University in 1977 and a doctorate in history from Duke University in 1997.
